Shots Fired Lead to Large Law Enforcement Presence on Searles Street in Eureka; Four Detained

About 5 p.m., Eureka Police assisted by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department and the California Highway Patrol searched several apartments in a building in the 1100 block of Searles Street for a shooter. According to Captain Brian Stephens of the Eureka Police Department, “It had to do with a stolen vehicle or a lost vehicle being located by the owner. The owner was confronted by some individuals.” Shots were believed to have been fired…We detained four people that we believe have some association with either the car or the incident itself.”

See the video below for the full interview.

“Everybody that was detained was wearing the same color of clothing,” said Captain Brian Stephens.

While it’s rare, sometimes people do “lose” their vehicle and end up contacting the police for help. Among the most common circumstances are in very large parking areas such as at amusement parks, very large shopping malls, or when visiting unfamiliar cities. In Humboldt County a more likely scenario is someone going for instance to a party at an unfamiliar location and maybe having to walk a few blocks – then they leave (perhaps going elsewhere with someone or after a little too much partying) but later can’t find their car no matter where they look. Another occasional circumstance is when a person with some sort of diminished mental capacity truly forgets where they last parked their car and, as in the other cases, a search of possible locations fails to turn it up.

California law provides that the police may take a “lost vehicle” report if there is nothing to suggest that the car has actually been stolen. It’s entered into the state’s Stolen Vehicle System database as “LOST,” and if it’s located the owner will be contacted to pick it up. Two differences for law enforcement are that while a reported STOLEN vehicle is entered into the statewide system and automatically goes directly into NCIC, the FBI’s nationwide database, NCIC does not accept “lost vehicle” reports. The other is that a lost vehicle entry into the California system is purged after 30 days, while stolen vehicle entries stay active nationwide for five years. However the agency that entered a lost vehicle is supposed to recontact the owner before the 30 days is up and then determine whether to reclassify the status to STOLEN or else renew its LOST status, which can be repeated monthly but the owner must be contacted in advance every month. Of course if the car is found, it’s immediately removed from the database(s).

So a stolen report is almost always the most logical, but once or twice in a career “lost” can fit the circumstances, at least for the first month.

I’ve also seen lost in the case of two friends visiting a mural friend with identical cars… both left keys by the door one grabbed wrong keys and wrong car the other noticed when going to put her kid in the car seat and their wasn’t one… they had to file it as lost so they could pull him over and let him know he was in the wrong car. It’s strange but it happens for lots of odd reasons.